Real-time congestion info IS available for Kitsap County

The in basket: Tom Baker of the city
of Bremerton electronic shop e-mailed me on July 24 to say, “I
happened to be in Bellevue during the I-90 lane closures, and paid
a bit more attention to the WSDOT Traffic Map on my Android phone.
When stopped in traffic, I noted the traffic flow was very close to
what was shown as Red-Yellow-Green.

“I then I looked at the traffic map for
Kitsap County/ Bremerton at about 9 p.m. and currently shows red
along Kitsap Way eastbound by Oyster Bay and some red along Callow
Avenue.

“Questions:

“WSDOT uses sensors to determine the
average speed. What are the sensors and how do they work for the
I-5, 405, etc. highways?

“How is the traffic map updated for
Kitsap County/Bremerton?”

The out basket: Tom’s question caught me
entirely by surprise, as I didn’t think there was any such
real-time information available online for West Sound highways
north of Gig Harbor.

The state provides online maps showing
traffic flow in green (good), yellow (slow), red (even slower) and,
on some maps, black (probably stopped) in the Seattle and Tacoma
areas. We see them all the time on the TV news. But the
information for Highway 16 ends at Gig Harbor.

Imagine my surprise when I found out Tom
got the Bremerton area display on his Android from this newspaper’s
Web site, at kitsapsun.com/traffic.

He was pretty quick in finding it, too.
Jeremy Judd, the paper’s Web site director, said it went up only
July 22, two days before Tom accessed it. The corporate office
provides it in agreement with a private company called Total
Traffic, which covers the nation.

I’m not sure how accurate it is, not
having a smart phone that could test it while I’m on the road. It
seems to always find red-level congestion near the Bremerton ferry
terminal, and to show yellow at intersections with a traffic
signal. It reliably shows the weekday afternoon backup on Highway 3
approaching Highway 304. It often shows slowdowns on Sedgwick Road
and as I write this, it shows congestion on Locker Road at
Sedgwick. I drove there to look but found nothing out of the
ordinary.

I e-mailed Total Traffic asking how it
gets its information, but I wasn’t hopeful of getting a
reply, and I didn’t. That’s probably proprietary information
they protect,

A state official told me he thinks Total
Traffic has agreements with companies with large fleets, like
delivery companies, and track the speed of the trucks. It’s a
nationwide network and The Sun’s depiction starts with the Puget
Sound area, with ways to zoom in and out.

The real-time data the state provides
online for Snohomish, King and Pierce counties is derived from
sensors in the pavement every half-mile or so, plus on freeway
ramps, says Claudia Bingham-Baker of the Olympic region. The
display is calculated by a computer based on the time it takes
vehicles to travel between sensors.

The state does use pavement sensors,
much farther apart, to collect traffic data here, but it’s for
long-term planning and business inquiries about traffic volumes.
It’s not shown in real-time displays. The assembled data can be
seen on the state DOT Web site at www.wsdot.wa.gov/mapsdata.htm.
Click on Travel Data. There are six such data collection stations
in Kitsap County.